Here’s how Republicans just might lose the House

This year, control of the House will be determined primarily by just 26 districts. And with 22 days to go until Nov. 5, neither party has a clear advantage.

Republicans took control of the House in 2022, with the slimmest of majorities—though “control” may be overstating things. Their majority has seen constant chaos, including the ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (after less than a year in leadership!), a dramatic battle to replace him, a failed impeachment of President Joe Biden, early retirements by frustrated members like Colorado Republican Ken Buck, and so much more.

All of that has given Democrats confidence that they can take back the House this year—and race ratings by The Cook Political Report, Inside Elections, and Sabato’s Crystal Ball suggest it’s possible. 

Overall, Democrats are favored in 202 districts and Republicans in 207, based on the median race rating between those three organizations. Race ratings are based on collections of polling, reporting, fundraising numbers, historical trends, and other data. The ratings generally break down into these categories: Solid Democratic or Republican, Likely Democratic or Republican, Lean Democratic or Republican, and Toss-up. (Inside Elections adds a “Tilt” rating, which lives between “Lean” and “Toss-up.” But for our purposes, that rating has been standardized to “Toss-up.”)

That means control of the House will most likely be determined by 26 toss-up districts. And the polling in them holds some glimmers of hope for Democrats—who need to pick up only four seats to take back the House—as well as a few warnings.

Here’s what you need to know. 

Race ratings are historically accurate. Cook’s 2024 analysis of its own ratings since 1984 found that it accurately predicted upward of 90% of races for governor, House, Senate, and president. And the more confident the rating, the greater the accuracy.

The 26 toss-up districts are spread across the country. Democrats currently hold 12 of those districts and Republicans 14, meaning that the GOP has slightly more at risk. If Democrats can hold all of their current seats—a huge “if”—they would need to flip only four districts to have a majority, assuming that the three current vacancies will be filled by the party that previously held them.

But even with the high accuracy of race ratings, a couple “Lean” or even “Likely” seats could flip as well. Forty-two races are not a “Solid” seat for either party.

Additionally, six districts are pretty likely to flip: Alabama’s 2nd, Louisiana’s 6th, New York’s 22nd, and North Carolina’s 6th, 13th, and 14th districts. These are districts where the median race rating conflicts with the party that currently holds the seat. For example, those three North Carolina seats are held by Democrats, but after the Republican state legislature passed a vicious gerrymander late last year, all three seats are now solidly Republican. 

However, Republicans’ expected gains in the Tar Heel State could be offset by potential Democratic flips in Alabama, Louisiana, and New York. Democrats are favored in the former two states due to a pair of court victories that overturned illegal gerrymanders (for this year, at least). 

In New York’s 22nd, though, incumbent Republican Brandon Williams faces off against John Mannion in a “Lean D” seat. Williams, an anti-abortion extremist who has flirted with election denialism, could prove too conservative for this swingy seat. Unfortunately, the race has seen only one poll so far, and it was fielded three months ago. It showed Mannion leading by 7 percentage points. But it was also paid for by the pro-Mannion House Majority PAC—so, grain of salt.

Williams has out-raised Mannion more than 2 to 1 as of the end of June. However, new FEC reports are due Oct. 15, so it’s possible Mannion closed the money gap since then.

Unlike Senate or presidential races, those in the House receive a lot less high-quality polling. Across 435 House races, only 131 polls have been conducted since May, according to 538’s polling database, as of Friday at 11:25 AM ET. Compare that to the Pennsylvania Senate race, which alone has seen 70 since May, or the presidential race, which has gotten 1,316 national polls in the same time period.

That being said, the polling that has come out looks promising for Democrats. There are 18 House races with two or more polls since May, excluding polls conducted on behalf of a candidate’s campaign, which are pretty unreliable. Of those 18, Democrats lead in 12, including five seats currently held by a Republican. One district, held by a Republican, shows a tie. And while Republicans lead in five races, they already hold four of those seats. 

Among these 18 races, the only Democratic incumbent polling underwater is freshman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, in Washington’s 3rd District. And even then, it’s by only half of 1 point. The median race rating of her seat says it’s a toss-up.

In other words, this limited data suggests Democrats could pick up some seats—and, if the rest of the map holds, retake the majority. But the operative words there are “limited data” and “if the rest of the map holds.”

The most-polled House race is Nebraska’s 2nd District, where Democrat Tony Vargas, a former state senator, leads incumbent Republican Don Bacon by an average of nearly 4 points. 

Despite Vargas’ fundraising running slightly behind Bacon’s as of June, he’s surely being boosted by this district’s importance at the top of the ticket. Nebraska splits its five electoral votes, awarding two to the statewide winner and one to the winner in each of its three districts. And because the 2nd District’s electoral vote could decide the presidential election this year, Democrats are really leaning into outreach there. (Polls show Vice President Kamala Harris with a consistent lead.) All that Democratic energy is no doubt helping Vargas.

But there are mixed results when it comes to the general congressional ballot, which measures whether survey respondents want a Democrat or Republican in Congress. 

The good news for Democrats? On July 21—the day that President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid—Republicans led Democrats on the generic ballot by 0.6 points, according to 538’s average

But now? Democrats lead by 1.3 points as of Friday. In fact, they’ve consistently led since Aug. 2, suggesting the lead is fairly solid. 

The bad news? Democrats’ generic-ballot advantage has slipped since Sept. 10, when they were leading by 2.7 points. And perhaps more importantly, they’re underperforming their polls at this time in 2020, when they led on the generic ballot by 6.8 points

While Democrats narrowly maintained control of the chamber in 2020, winning 222 seats to Republicans’ 213, House polls in that cycle heavily overestimated Democrats, according to analysis by 538’s Nathaniel Rakich. In fact, Rakich found that House polls overestimated Democrats in 10 of the past 13 cycles, though those amounts range from D+0.2 in the 2022 cycle—very accurate!—to D+6.1 in the 2020 cycle. Very not accurate! 

Put simply, if polling error this year resembles that in 2020, Republicans would almost certainly grow their House majority. And possibly by a lot.

At the same time, Democrats could very well retake the House if polls are as accurate as in 2022—or, better yet, if they’re overestimating Republicans. After all, Rakich’s analysis shows it’s happened three times since 1998. It could happen again.

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With GOP poised to take the Senate, Democrats must do this to stop them

Every vote matters—more than ever. 

The latest poll from Siena College for The New York Times suggests Republicans are on track to retake the Senate, with their candidates leading in Montana—which is held by Democratic Sen. Jon Tester—as well as in Florida and Texas, Democrats’ two best pickup opportunities. 

With the retirement of Sen. Joe Manchin, Republicans are all but sure to nab his seat in dark-red West Virginia. If this poll’s results bear out, Democrats’ 51-49 Senate majority would slip to a 49-51 minority, assuming they win in every other contested Senate seat they currently hold.

This should energize every Democrat to get out to vote and drive turnout to record levels. And there’s some evidence that may already be happening.

In Montana, Tester faces Republican Tim Sheehy, a political newcomer. The Donald Trump-esque play of presenting nonexpertise as being a “political outsider” appears to have resonated in the Big Sky State. The Times poll shows Tester down 8 percentage points, with 44% to Sheehy’s 52% among likely voters. However, 538’s polling average shows a closer race, with Sheehy ahead by 5.4 points.

Losing this seat and Manchin’s would effectively halt the agenda of a President Kamala Harris if she were elected this year. It would slow down cabinet appointments or force her to use acting secretaries. It would enable politicized impeachment trials if Republicans also held their House majority. Perhaps most consequently of all, a Republican Senate majority would be able to swat down any of Harris’ potential Supreme Court nominees.

Given Tester’s long odds of holding his seat, Democrats turn to their two best Senate pickup opportunities: Texas and Florida. 

Vying for his third term, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz lead’s Democrat Colin Allred by 4 points, 48% to 44% percent, in what the Times calls Democrats’ “best opportunity” for flipping a seat. The poll’s result is in line with 538’s polling average for the race, which shows Cruz ahead by 3.6 points.

In Florida, Republican Sen. Rick Scott holds a large 9-point lead over Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, 49% to 40%. That being said, 538’s polling average shows a tighter race, with Scott half that lead, at 4.5 points. 

As Daily Kos reported in September, polls are not election results, and because of that, “they can be changed by donating, mobilizing, and voting for Democratic candidates.”

Turnout is already breaking records. In New Mexico, early voting indicates a historic level of turnout. The same goes for Ohio, whose most populous county saw a higher level of first-day early voting this year than in 2016. Ohio is also where Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is fighting to keep his seat. 538’s polling average shows him leading by 2.3 points.

But Democrats need to keep the momentum. Mobilizing their voters will be crucial in not only defending vulnerable seats but also expanding their majority where possible. Grassroots efforts, shoe-leather canvassing, and targeted outreach can make a difference in galvanizing support and turnout.

You can help turn out the vote for the election by simply chatting to your neighbors. This is a cool one! Click here to sign up for Daily Kos/Indivisible’s Neighbor2Neighbor get-out-the-vote program.

These swing-state Republicans promise to certify election even if Trump loses

Thirty-two members of Congress have signed a “Unity Commitment” pledging to respect the results of the upcoming presidential election, certify the results, and attend the inauguration while calling for calm and opposing related political violence, according to a copy of the pledge obtained by Politico and released on Friday.

Historically, certifying election results has been a routine function of Congress, conducted without controversy or violence—until supporters of Donald Trump rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Six of the 32 pledge’s signatories are Republicans, with most coming from swing districts. They are Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, and Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, and Anthony D’Esposito, all from New York. The remaining 26 signatories are Democrats.

Bacon, who represents Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, organized the pledge with Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey. Bacon’s district is of unusual importance to the 2024 election because it exists in one of only two states (along with Maine) that allocates part of its Electoral College vote based on which candidate wins in the district. In 2020, President Joe Biden won one of his 306 electoral votes from the district, defeating Donald Trump. And Bacon was reelected to his seat in 2022 by less than 3 percentage points.

Similarly, Fitzpatrick, Lawler, Chavez-DeRemer, and D’Esposito won by just single digits that year, though LaLota won by 11 points. Those who were in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, also voted to certify Biden’s victory over Trump. In total, 147 Republicans—139 in the House, eight in the Senate—voted against certifying the 2020 results.

In all likelihood, the Republicans who signed the Unity Commitment face constituents who are less likely to buy into the election denialism promoted by right-wing figures like Donald Trump.

By contrast, on the same day the pledge was released, Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin said on CNN that he would not commit to certifying the results. Mullin’s home state has strongly supported Trump’s campaigns, with Trump winning it by over 30 points in 2020.

“I’m not going to sit up here and tell you what I’m going to do and not going to do until I see the results,” he told CNN host Pamela Brown.

Mullin’s remarks follow Trump once again lying during Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that he won the 2020 race.

Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, similarly said in a recent interview that he would have supported fake electors in 2020 that falsely claimed Trump had won, a process which would have invalidated millions of Biden-Harris votes.

Law enforcement officials recently announced enhanced security procedures meant to prevent another Jan. 6-style event. The Secret Service on Wednesday said it had designated the upcoming certification of the presidential election as a “National Special Security Event,” following a request from Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Seven deaths have been tied to the 2021 attack, as have the assaults of at least 174 police officers. Trump was impeached for a second time and has been indicted for allegedly inciting the incident.

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New Harris ad shows GOP officials shunning ‘wannabe dictator’ Trump

 The Harris-Walz campaign on Monday released a new ad highlighting major Republican figures who have worked with Donald Trump that have now shunned him and oppose his presidential campaign.

The ad, titled “The Best People,” is set to run on Fox News Channel and in West Palm Beach, Florida (where Trump’s home/resort Mar-A-Lago is located) ahead of the upcoming presidential debate.

Included in the ad are quotes from many who were part of Trump’s first administration: former Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, national security adviser John Bolton, and General Mark Milley. 

“Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States. It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year,” Pence said. 

When asked if the nation’s secrets are safe with Trump, Esper answered, “No, I mean, it's just irresponsible action that places our service members at risk, places our nation's security at risk.”

Bolton states that “Trump will cause a lot of damage. The only thing he cares about is Donald Trump.”

The ad follows recent announcements from former Rep. Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney—both prominent Republicans—that they would be voting for Harris in the election, citing the threat that Trump represents to democracy.

“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again,” Cheney said in a statement.

Trump infamously called on Pence to subvert the U.S. Constitution following their joint loss to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2020 presidential election. On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump posted on X, formerly Twitter, “States want to correct their votes, which they now know were based on irregularities and fraud, plus corrupt process never received legislative approval. All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”

Pence declined to follow Trump’s demand and instead followed federal law by voting to certify the election results. Trump then encouraged his supporters to attack the Capitol, for which he was later impeached (for a second time).

The new ad also highlights the rupture in the relationship between Trump and Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump. Milley and the other heads of America’s military branches (Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy, and Coast Guard) sent out a statement in January 2021 condemning the Jan. 6 attack.

U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley

In a 2023 speech excerpted in the commercial, Milley warned of “wannabe dictators” in what was widely seen as a condemnation of Trump.

“We are unique among the world’s militaries. We don’t take an oath to a country, we don’t take an oath to a tribe, we don’t take an oath to a religion. We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or a tyrant or a dictator,” Milley said. “And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America—and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

As part of his campaign, Trump has said he would use the power of the presidency in a second term to round up and mass deport undocumented immigrants. Trump has also said he would seek retribution against his political enemies.

Since being sworn into office in 2021, Biden has used the presidency to advocate for freedom and has warned about the autocratic threat from Trump and the Republican Party. In his July address from the Oval Office announcing his decision to step down from the presidential race, Biden said the move was motivated by his support for democracy.

“The great thing about America is, here, kings and dictators do not rule. The people do. History is in your hands, the idea of America lies in your hands,” Biden said.

“Freedom” has been the central theme of Harris’ campaign since she took over from Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. She has taken Trump to task for his decisions that directly led to Roe v. Wade being overturned and abortion rights being upended, as well as his actions to subvert democracy.

Speaking in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in August, at the same site where Trump accepted the Republican nomination a few weeks before, Harris summarized the campaign’s theme.

“We are witnessing across our nation a full-on attack on hard-fought, hard-won, fundamental freedoms and rights across our nation, like the freedom to vote, the freedom to be safe from gun violence, the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride,” Harris said.

Sign here: Harris taps Tim Walz. Now let’s defeat Trump and Republicans up and down the ballot. 

Judge delays Trump’s sentencing in hush money case till after election

A judge agreed Friday to postpone Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush money case until after the November election, granting him a hard-won reprieve as he navigates the aftermath of his criminal conviction and the homestretch of his presidential campaign.

Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan, who is also weighing a defense request to overturn the verdict on immunity grounds, delayed Trump’s sentencing until Nov. 26, several weeks after the final votes are cast in the presidential election.

It had been scheduled for Sept. 18, about seven weeks before Election Day.

Merchan wrote that he was postponing the sentencing “to avoid any appearance—however unwarranted—that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching presidential election in which the Defendant is a candidate.”

“The Court is a fair, impartial, and apolitical institution,” he added.

Trump’s lawyers pushed for the delay on multiple fronts, petitioning the judge and asking a federal court to intervene. They argued that punishing the former president and current Republican nominee in the thick of his campaign to retake the White House would amount to election interference.

Trump’s lawyers argued that delaying his sentencing until after the election would also allow him time to weigh next steps after Merchan rules on the defense’s request to reverse his conviction and dismiss the case because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s July presidential immunity ruling.

Judge Juan M. Merchan

In his order Friday, Merchan delayed a decision on that until Nov. 12.

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Trump’s request to have the U.S. District Court in Manhattan seize the case from Merchan’s state court. Had they been successful, Trump’s lawyers said they would have then sought to have the verdict overturned and the case dismissed on immunity grounds.

Trump is appealing the federal court ruling.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Trump’s case, deferred to Merchan and did not take a position on the defense’s delay request.

Messages seeking comment were left for Trump's lawyers and the district attorney's office.

Election Day is Nov. 5, but many states allow voters to cast ballots early, with some set to start the process just a few days before or after Sept. 18.

Trump was convicted in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election. Daniels claims she and Trump had a sexual encounter a decade earlier after they met at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.

Prosecutors cast the payout as part of a Trump-driven effort to keep voters from hearing salacious stories about him during his first presidential campaign. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen paid Daniels and was later reimbursed by Trump, whose company logged the reimbursements as legal expenses.

Trump maintains that the stories were false, that reimbursements were for legal work and logged correctly, and that the case—brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat—was part of a politically motivated “witch hunt” aimed at damaging his current campaign.

Democrats backing their party’s nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, have made his conviction a focus of their messaging.

In speeches at the party’s conviction in Chicago last month, President Joe Biden called Trump a “convicted felon” running against a former prosecutor. Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas labeled Trump a “career criminal, with 34 felonies, two impeachments, and one porn star to prove it.”

Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, inspired chants of “lock him up” from the convention crowd when she quipped that Trump “fell asleep at his own trial, and when he woke up, he made his own kind of history: the first person to run for president with 34 felony convictions.”

Falsifying business records is punishable by up to four years behind bars. Other potential sentences include probation, a fine or a conditional discharge, which would require Trump to stay out of trouble to avoid additional punishment. Trump is the first ex-president convicted of a crime.

Trump has pledged to appeal, but that cannot happen until he is sentenced.

In seeking the delay, Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove argued that the short time between the scheduled immunity ruling on Sept. 16 and sentencing, which was to have taken place two days later, was unfair to Trump.

To prepare for a Sept. 18 sentencing, the lawyers said, prosecutors would be submitting their punishment recommendation while Merchan is still weighing whether to dismiss the case. If Merchan rules against Trump, he would need “adequate time to assess and pursue state and federal appellate options,” they said.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.

Trump’s lawyers argue that in light of the ruling, jurors in the hush money case should not have heard such evidence as former White House staffers describing how the then-president reacted to news coverage of the Daniels deal.

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The man behind Project 2025’s most radical plans

As Donald Trump tried to disavow the politically toxic project, its director, Paul Dans, stepped down. But the plans and massive staffing database that he prepared—to replace thousands of members of the “deep state” with MAGA loyalists—remain.

by Alec MacGillis, for ProPublica

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In January 2023, a group of about 15 people gathered for three days at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington think tank a few blocks from the Capitol. Their aim was ambitious and farsighted: to start building the next Republican administration, two years before a Republican president might again take office.

The group’s leaders originally cast the initiative as candidate-agnostic, intended to assist the 2024 Republican nominee, whoever that might be. But there was no real doubt who the envisioned beneficiary was. The team included several former members of the Trump administration, and the whole effort was geared to address a perceived shortcoming of that White House: its failure to fill enough key government positions with Trump loyalists. So few had expected Trump to win in 2016 that hiring had been left mostly to GOP veterans, who brought in establishment figures and never managed to fill some slots at all, leaving the president exposed to the bureaucratic resistance that his acolytes believe undermined him at every step: the dreaded “deep state.”

They were determined not to let this happen again. This time, Trump would take office with a fully staffed, carefully selected administration ready to roll. Thus the name of this new effort at Heritage, Project 2025. It would consist of four “pillars”: an 887-page policy plan, a database of conservatives willing to serve in the administration, training seminars for potential new appointees on the functions of government and a battle plan for each agency.

In recent months, Project 2025 has gotten attention for some of the more radical proposals in its policy plan—such as reinstating more stringent rules for the use of the abortion pill mifepristone and abolishing some federal agencies. On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made the project the centerpiece of their case against a Trump restoration. Their attacks were so effective that Trump has publicly disavowed the effort (while selecting a running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who is closely allied with Heritage).

This week, as Project 2025 faced denunciations from the Trump campaign, the project’s director, Paul Dans, stepped down from his role. Trump’s campaign co-managers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, said in a statement that “reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed, and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.” For Dans, it was a sudden end—or at least a pause—in a remarkable ascent from obscurity.

But then again, his resignation was at least partly symbolic: The work of Project 2025 is largely done. Under Dans, the project has assembled a database of more than 10,000 names — job candidates vetted for loyalty to Trump’s cause — who will be ready to deploy into federal agencies should he win the 2024 election. Project 2025 has delivered a toolkit, ready for use, to create a second Trump administration that would be decidedly more MAGA than the first.

The most important pillar of Project 2025 has always been about personnel, not policy. Or rather, the whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs. To that end, the plan’s most pertinent proposal is reinstating Schedule F—a provision unveiled near the very end of Trump’s term, then repealed by the Biden administration—which would shift as many as 50,000 career employees in policy-shaping positions into a new job category that would make them much easier to fire.

This was the mission that brought people together at Heritage for those three days, with the task of designing the personnel database that would populate the next administration, all under the supervision of Dans, a tall, broad-shouldered guy with a slow, jut-chinned way of speaking and traces of a Baltimore accent.

Not long ago, Dans, 55, would have seemed an unlikely person for the role. The son of a liberal Johns Hopkins University professor, Dans was a New York lawyer who before Trump’s election had never served in government. For years following that election, he had tried and failed to find a place in the administration, seemingly in spite of a celebrity connection: His wife was a fitness coach for Karlie Kloss, the supermodel sister-in-law of Jared Kushner. Finally, in 2019, Dans got in the door, at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Some four years later, here he was, hoping to build the next administration. Dans envisioned the personnel database that he wanted to create as a “conservative LinkedIn.” To help explain it, he displayed sketches he had made. They depicted the online file for a sample applicant—“Betsy Ross.” One page would show her occupation, which of the conservative organizations supporting Project 2025 had suggested her, and which agencies she was being considered for. Another would show the findings of an internal review of her application, her progress on the training sessions (one of which Dans called “Deep State 101”), and any “red flags.” Yet another would show additional vetting: a “webcrawl” report; her performance on the Project 2025 questionnaire, which would ask detailed questions about ideological and policy beliefs; and more. The database would allow administration officials to search for candidates of a certain profile to fit a certain role.

The Heritage Foundation building in Washington, D.C.

This was what Dans wanted the Heritage staffers gathered in the room and the tech engineers they’d contracted from Oracle to build: the engine of Trump 2.0. It would be a personnel machine not only far beyond what the first Trump administration had at its disposal, but beyond what any other administration had enjoyed, either. According to one person in attendance, the database would take several months to build and would cost upward of $2 million. It would reach outside the usual channels to draw in MAGA believers from across the country. And Dans was at the helm. “There was no one who had a better idea of it than he did,” the person in attendance told me. “He was driving the whole thing.”

As the database development progressed in the months that followed, Dans stressed a detail that made it even more far-reaching. He did not want the positions being filled to be limited to the 4,000 or so slots that are reserved for political appointments. He also wanted it to suggest people for roles that are currently assigned to career employees, in keeping with the plans for Schedule F.

Propelling the project has been a worldview that can be easily overlooked amid Trump’s talk about restoring the halcyon days of his first term. The people preparing for his return to the White House emphatically do not view his first term as a success. Rather, they view it as a missed opportunity to implement the MAGA vision. For Dans, Trump’s first term was an object lesson in how difficult it could be to reach Trump’s goals without a captive bureaucracy.

The former president’s supporters are determined that a second Trump administration would be much more organized than the first, stocked with foot soldiers who are both loyal and capable of moving policy forward. Dans declined to be interviewed for this article or to respond on the record to a detailed list of questions, but he has been laying out his thinking in interviews with conservative media outlets. “We’re going to get this done right on the next go-round,” he told Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, on her podcast last winter. And in essence, that will mean cleaning house, he said. “If a person can’t get in and fire people right away, what good is political management?”

***

Paul Dans was raised, in the 1970s and ’80s, in a family that embodied liberal idealism. Peter Dans was a professor of medicine who had enlisted in the Public Health Service; started an STD clinic and a migrant health clinic while on faculty at the University of Colorado; and served in the office of Sen. Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin Democrat who founded Earth Day. Paul’s mom, Colette Lizotte, was a French teacher who had previously worked as a chemist at the National Institutes of Health.

The family lived in a hilly, verdant stretch north of Baltimore. Paul and his twin brother, Tom, hung out with the other smart kids at Dulaney High School; they played sports and were on the debate team. “Both were very bright kids, very well behaved,” recalled Phil Sporer, who attended school with them from early on. “The Dans boys were everybody’s perfect child.”

The first hints of Dans’ political orientation emerged in college. He went to MIT, where he majored in economics, joined a frat, played on the lacrosse team and, as classmate Juan Latasa told me, stood apart from the “political correctness” that was rising at elite campuses around 1990. “It wasn’t always easy for such students. It was a very liberal place,” Latasa said. “It was tough.”

Dans stayed on at MIT to get his master’s in city planning. His thesis on the redevelopment of industrial parks, like the Brooklyn Navy Yard, showed him still wrestling with competing impulses. There was Reagan-style optimism: “The myriad crises which America must grapple with in coming years pale in magnitude to the nation’s gifted legacy.” But there was also a hint of resigned declinism, with Dans addressing an “age of diminished expectations.”

At the University of Virginia School of Law, which Dans attended next, his transformation became explicit: He joined the campus branch of the Federalist Society, the conservative network founded by law students at Yale and the University of Chicago in the 1980s, and he rose to become chapter president. “I was always attracted with the Federalist Society message about how some daring students stood up at Yale Law School and challenged the hegemony there and really was trying to speak truth to power,” he told hosts Saurabh Sharma and Nick Solheim last year on “Moment of Truth,” a podcast produced by American Moment, a conservative organization now aligned with Project 2025.

Still, Dans left little mark on his law school classmates, perhaps partly because he took a year off to study in Paris. I reached out to a couple dozen of his peers, and an email from a lawyer in Dallas was representative: “I wish I could help but I do not remember any details about Paul Dans.”

***

Dans’ fixation on the federal bureaucracy began at home. The idealism of the 1960s brought his parents to Washington, where they met while working at the National Institutes of Health. “They had basically come up through the JFK, Kennedy-esque, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’” era, he told Sharma and Solheim.

Dans didn’t seriously consider following his parents into public service—law school debt precluded that option, he said—but he would ultimately become wrapped up in a debate that had first inspired them. They went to Washington during the federal government’s great post-World War II expansion, when the ranks of career employees began swelling and when more job protections started accruing to them, sparking a decadeslong argument that has carried on to this day. To federal employee unions and other defenders of the bureaucracy, such protections were in the spirit of the Pendleton Act, the 1883 law that created the modern federal workforce, along with mechanisms for employment based on merit. But to many conservative critics, and some good-government liberals, the job protections that federal workers gained in the 1960s undermined the “merit based” nature of the civil service by making it difficult to remove ineffectual workers.

An undated photo of Donald Trump in his New York City office, from the 1990s

After law school, Dans chose a different meritocracy, joining a wave of young attorneys in the New York corporate legal world in the late ’90s. But Dans stood out. He was much more conservative than most of his colleagues. He prided himself on being one of very few in his Upper West Side building to get the New York Post. He admired Donald Trump for bringing a “can-do spirit back … building on the skyline again.”

Some colleagues kept their distance, but not Julio Ramos, a fellow junior associate at the law firm LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae. Dans kidded Ramos about his lefty politics and regaled him with talk of supply-side economics and Reagan. It was all very civil. “Even though he was from the right,” Ramos told me, “he didn’t have any hatred toward the left.”

Dans left after three years to become an associate at another large firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, and after two years there eventually landed at a less prestigious firm, where his cases included a lawsuit between Yves Saint Laurent’s beauty line and Costco over perfume labeling. By 2009, having not made partner anywhere, and two years into his marriage to Mary Helen Bowers, a former New York City Ballet dancer, Dans went into solo practice.

Dans has criticized the legal field for what he perceives to be anti-conservative discrimination. “We are, as a profession, really getting snowed under right now,” he said on the “Moment of Truth” podcast. “Republicans and conservatives have not stood up in the face of, kind of, cancel culture, and [these] Marxist, Saul Alinsky attacks.”

Even the moment he has often framed as his biggest triumph affirmed Dans’ alienation from liberal lawyers. In 2009, he was one of hundreds of attorneys hired to defend Chevron and its employees against a multibillion-dollar lawsuit for oil pollution in Ecuador. According to the journalist Michael Goldhaber, Dans was hired at $100 an hour—less than 5% of the top rate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which was leading Chevron’s defense.

As Dans later told Goldhaber, he had an epiphany: While watching the documentary film “Crude,” an exposé of Chevron in Ecuador that was done in collaboration with the plaintiffs’ lead lawyer on the case, Steven Donziger, Dans realized that the outtakes from the film should be subpoenaed, to see if the filmmaker captured any legal malfeasance by Donziger. Dans put the suggestion in a memo.

As it turned out, the subpoenaed outtakes did prove to be damning. Chevron sued Donziger in U.S. federal court, ultimately resulting in a ruling that the company did not have to pay the $9.5 billion judgment. Dans took full credit: “I came up with a theory that we could get documentary film outtakes, basically caught them doing their nefarious acts on video,” he told Martin on her podcast.

According to other lawyers on the case, the story is more complicated: Although Dans wrote a memo suggesting the outtakes be targeted, others started the push for subpoenas—and came up with the necessary legal basis for seeking the crucial outtakes—independently of Dans raising the idea.

When the Chevron case was over, Dans was back on his own, handling motley litigation, including a patent fight between two manufacturers of sheet-pile wall systems and a class action against Frito-Lay regarding its claims that some of its products were made with all-natural ingredients. The address for Dans’ solo practice was a mail drop at the New York City Bar Association.

Toward the end of the aughts, as President Barack Obama’s first term wore on, Dans’ conservatism began to take on a new shape. He spent a lot of time online. “I’m one of the people sitting at his kitchen counter, you know, on the bench there, on the stool kind of going, How can that be? That’s crazy,” he told Martin. “You’re clicking … you know, refreshing the Drudge Report like 100 times a day.”

One thing he clicked on was Trump’s conspiracist claims about Obama’s origins: “I had some serious academic questioning about the birthplace of a former president, if you will,” he told Sharma and Solheim. Dans got excited when rumors spread in 2011 that Trump would be going to New Hampshire to announce a run for president. Alas, it didn’t happen.

***

Early in the 2016 primary season, Dans attended a dinner of the steering committee for the New York City Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society. As he later recalled to Sharma and Solheim, someone asked whom people were supporting for president, and around the table it went: “I like Jeb.” “I like Marco.” “I like Jeb.”

Dans watched in bewilderment. Here were all these New York Republicans, and no one had yet mentioned the man who lived a few blocks away, who had decided to run for president this time. Finally, it was Dans’ turn. “Well, I like Trump, and I think he’s going to win,” he later told Sharma and Solheim. “I like him because I’m sick of losing.”

Donald Trump speaks in September 2015.

That fall, Dans headed to the Pittsburgh area to volunteer for Trump. He had worked on other campaigns, but none had ever felt like this. “There was no passion,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “We were hungry for a candidate who could really speak to Americans. … Donald Trump delivered.”

Trump’s appeal to Dans verged on the tribal: He came to see himself as “a pure-blooded deplorable mix,” as he told Sharma and Solheim, citing the working-class, ethnic Catholic roots of his ancestors—his paternal grandfather was born to Spanish immigrant parents and had been a merchant mariner, and his mother hailed from French Canadian mill workers in Rhode Island. Never mind that his father was a medical professor who had raised Dans in an affluent suburb.

When Trump won, Dans eagerly sent off his resume. “Next stop, you know, Department of Justice, right?” he said to Martin years later, recalling his confidence. But no. As he also told Sharma and Solheim, the response was “crickets.”

His explanation? He was too MAGA. “There were so many people getting sandbagged because somebody thought that they were too ‘America First’-y or too Trumpist,” he told Martin. He was advised to instead slip in “under the radar” as “just your milquetoast Republican appointee.” Watching his accounts of this disappointment, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Dans, whose affect in interviews can come off as both genial and awkward, like the chatty, perhaps too chatty, guy at the airport bar.

Finally, late in 2018, Dans came to Washington for a Federalist Society meeting and connected with James Bacon, a college student who was working as confidential assistant to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. With Bacon’s help, and with the benefit of his master’s in city planning, Dans finally broke in, in July 2019, as a senior adviser in HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development.

Career staff at HUD didn’t know what to make of Dans. “We tried to figure out what his role was,” one of them told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “He kind of wandered in,” the career employee said. “He was fairly disdainful of the career staff and did not have a lot of respect for why things were the way they were.” For Dans, his arrival was a “real baptism” in how the government actually works. “You don’t realize that the federal government is just an avalanche of money shooting out of various agencies,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “It’s trying to tame this spew of money and direct in the right way, is what you’re doing when you get to an agency.”

As Dans saw it, the career employees were the problem. They were biased against conservatives, and they disregarded changes sought by the duly elected administration. Dans also blamed fellow appointees, too many of whom were clueless about the actual work and thus willing to cede decision-making to career employees. “You came and you went to cocktail parties, and you had your birthday cakes around the office and, you know, maybe a couple of ribbon cuttings, and you got to go on a little international junket,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “And meanwhile, everything else is kind of going at the same level.”

***

By late 2019, the White House was coming to share Dans’ diagnosis. James Sherk, then a special assistant on the Domestic Policy Council, began compiling purported examples of what they viewed as deep-state obstinacy that Trump should have been able to discipline with dismissals, including anonymous reports about Environmental Protection Agency employees withholding information about legal cases from political appointees and about Department of Justice lawyers refusing to investigate discrimination against Asian Americans at Yale.

The ultimate example of perceived perfidy came in December 2019, when the House used the testimony of federal employees to approve two articles of impeachment against Trump: for using the levers of powers to pressure Ukraine into discrediting Biden and for obstructing Congress. This gave Trump and his remaining White House coterie new resolve to take more control of hiring.

Trump turned the Presidential Personnel Office over to John McEntee, his 29-year-old former personal assistant who had left the White House in 2018 after a background check found that he posed a security risk due to his frequent gambling. (McEntee, now an adviser for Project 2025, has declined to comment about the background check in the past.) McEntee recruited Bacon, the college student, to assist him in overhauling personnel, and, looking for someone to join in the effort, they settled on Paul Dans. The person who had barely made it into the administration had impressed them with his critiques of the status quo.

In February 2020, the White House installed Dans at Office of Personnel Management as “White House liaison and senior adviser to the director”—its eyes and ears there.

Former Presidential Personnel Office director John McEntee in February 2020

Dans, encouraged by McEntee, wasted no time. He quickly ordered the removal of the agency’s chief of staff, Jonathan Blyth, and asserted so much authority across the agency that its director, Dale Cabaniss, who had spent years as a Republican staff member in the Senate, decided to leave as well. Cabaniss was replaced by an interim director, Michael Rigas, but people at the agency told me that Dans was the de facto director for the remainder of the year; late in 2020, he was named chief of staff. (Rigas and Blyth did not respond to requests for comment; Cabaniss declined to comment on the record.) So total was the takeover of the personnel process that Dans’ colleagues took to referring to him, McEntee and their allies as “the coup group.”

One of Dans’ first assertions of authority came at a senior staff meeting after Cabaniss’ departure, amid the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. According to another Trump appointee, some 20 people were present in the conference room at OPM’s headquarters near the National Mall when the agency’s then-chief information officer, Clare Martorana, said that, like most other agencies, it would use Zoom for online meetings.

Dans erupted, declaring that Zoom, which was founded by a Chinese immigrant to the U.S., posed the risk of spying by China. Martorana took in his outburst with “a combination of anger, amusement and just dumbstruck awe,” the Trump appointee recalled. She then tried to explain that Zoom was on the government’s approved list of vendors and that many other agencies were using it. This did not mollify Dans.

As 2020 went on, Dans’ colleagues became accustomed to his insistent demands, which, coupled with his large frame, could make him an intimidating presence. Dans wanted to hire as many appointees as possible in the final year of Trump’s term in office, and he wanted the agency’s processes to move faster. “He would just throw bombs into senior staff meetings,” said the appointee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, “and they would say: ‘What are we supposed to do with this? He can’t be serious with this.’”

In October 2020, less than two weeks before the election, Trump signed an executive order creating Schedule F, the new category of career employees in key positions who would now be easier to remove.

Over at OPM, Dans was busy with a related effort, seeking to recategorize positions in the Senior Executive Service—higher-ranking managerial slots across the government that are mostly filled with career employees—into a general category that would allow the president to appoint more of them. He was also engaged in another aspect of the administration’s new emphasis on personnel: making sure that OPM appointees answered long ideological questionnaires and met for interviews with staffers to assess their fitness for staying on in a second Trump term.

Those who dealt with Dans at OPM told me that they tried to respond to his demands as best they could, but that he often grew agitated when told that OPM did not have the ability to do what he wanted. He seemed to take such explanations as a personal affront. “He questioned everything from the point of view that there was a conspiracy against him and the president,” the appointee said.

Colleagues chalked up his outbursts to insecurity born of his not understanding how the government worked and being broadly out of his depth. “He reminded me of some of the people who show up at Republican conventions,” said a second Republican appointee at the agency, who, like the first, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “Those people usually show up and then go home. They show up and are vocal, but they’re not like, ‘Now I’m going to go do the boring work of the sausage-making of government.’”

Donald Devine, who led OPM during the Reagan administration and whom the Trump administration had brought on as an adviser during this period, scoffs at such critiques. “If you do anything, people aren’t going to like it, and that’s why he’s so different,” Devine told me. “Most of the other people in the executive office of OPM weren’t doing much, so people didn’t care about them. He’s a serious person trying to do a serious job. You don’t see a lot of that, and that’s why I like him so much.”

Dans’ only problem, Devine said, was that he ran out of time. “The major things were going to be done the next term,” he said. “It was too late to do anything before they figured out how to run personnel.”

After the election, Dans stayed hard at work at OPM, even as other appointees started to vanish in the final weeks of the Trump administration. Since then, Dans has criticized prosecutions of those involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “The unfortunate thing is it does send a message to people that you shouldn’t criticize the government,” he said in a C-SPAN interview last year.

A year and a half after arriving in Washington, Dans left for his new home in South Carolina, near his wife’s hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, while she was expecting their fourth child. “I went home kind of in this Cincinnatus sort of spirit: return to the farm. Our farm being in Fort Mill, South Carolina, in a subdivision,” he quipped to Sharma and Solheim.

But then he turned serious: “We’re ‘God, country and family.’ And now is the time to go put a little more emphasis on the God and family part of that. But we’ll be back for the country thing.”

***

With the 2024 election approaching, with Trump leading Biden and then Harris in most national polls and with Dans’ vision of reshaping the bureaucracy heavily influencing the Trump campaign, it finally seemed like Dans’ moment might actually be arriving. On Tuesday’s episode of the “War Room” podcast—founded by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who is now in prison—Dans sometimes sounded triumphant. “In order to take this back, the swamp isn’t going to drain itself,” he said. “We need outsiders coming in committed to doing this. … With Project 2025, we built a pathway to encourage folks to do this.”

Paul Dans at the 2024 Republican National Convention on July 17

But in that same “War Room” episode on Tuesday, Dans decried the “great disinformation campaign” underway against Project 2025, “almost a hoax.” He listed some of the mistruths that Democrats had voiced about the project’s proposals, including a claim by Harris that it would eliminate Social Security. “Just completely fallacious stuff,” he said. “It’s just one big bald-faced lie.”

It was plain that he was taking the attacks very personally, and with good reason. The Democrats’ campaign to turn Project 2025 into an albatross around Trump’s neck was succeeding, to the point where some sort of dramatic break was needed. Just hours after that episode aired came word that Dans would be stepping down. “We are extremely grateful for [Dans’] and everyone’s work on Project 2025 and dedication to saving America,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts said.

In a note to Heritage staff, obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Dans himself suggested that his mission was, essentially, complete. “The work of this project was due to wrap up with the nominating conventions of the political parties,” he wrote. “Our work is presently winding down, and I plan later in August to leave Heritage.”

It was face-saving, but it was also largely true. The database was built; the training seminars had been taught. This time, the foot soldiers were ready to go, just waiting to be called on. “From the president’s lips to God’s ears that change is going to happen? It really happens below” the president, Dans said on “War Room.” “That’s the importance of recognizing: Personnel is really the cornerstone of the change.”

Disavowals or not, the logic of Project 2025 is embedded in the DNA of Trump’s plan to overhaul the government. Reinstating Schedule F is still a top-level agenda item. Jacqueline Simon, the public policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, told me that the agencies could end up defining the new employment category so broadly that it could encompass far more than 50,000 positions. “It will be a purge,” she said.

Donald Moynihan, a public policy professor at Georgetown University, does not expect Trump to fire tens of thousands. Jettisoning just a couple of thousand, to make an example of them, may be enough. “They can fire 1,000 and put their heads on pikes, and then everyone else quickly falls into line,” he told me. “That way you have a terrified bureaucracy that still has institutional knowledge. That’s the more strategic way to use Schedule F, to scare the bejesus out of 49,000 people and force them into line.” Sherk, the author of Schedule F, suggested as much to me. “The notion we’re going to can 50,000 people is just insane,” he said. “Why would you do that? That would kneecap the ability to implement your agenda. You use it to go after bad actors and rank incompetents.”

That would still leave the challenge of finding people to fill the 4,000 slots for appointees and however many hundreds or thousands of openings are created by firings. Many Republicans who served in the first Trump administration are leery of serving in a second. “The last administration was a joke, and they had a real problem recruiting,” a Washington attorney who served in the George W. Bush administration, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution against his firm, told me. “Who the hell would jump into this clown car driving toward a cliff? Are people going to come forward, quality people? Not a fucking chance.”

This was precisely Dans’ mission with Project 2025: to find a whole new corps of people willing to come to the capital and do the work of implementing the Trump agenda that the usual D.C. fixtures refuse to do. How many will be suited to the task? “We have to recruit the talent to get to Washington,” Dans told Martin. “Ultimately, what Project 2025 is is a call to action for patriots to come serve in Washington.”

Will Dans himself be among that number? As Devine sees it, Dans’ current defenestration is political, and temporary. “Paul is too bright and intelligent not to,” he said. “They’ll pick him up somewhere.” Devine said that he’s spoken with Dans since his decision to resign. “He’s doing well,” Devine said. “He’s ready to go on to fight. The memorandum he sent [to Heritage colleagues] ends with that: ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’” Dans still sees himself as a field general for a new class of Trump bureaucrats, one that will come to power if Trump wins, whether the effort is called Project 2025 or not.

There is a paradox at the core of this. Dans was never looking for the proverbial farmers with pitchforks, because he is aware of how complex the work of the federal government is. Dans was looking for people who are both angry enough about the state of the country to want to commit four years to serving Donald Trump in Washington to fix it, and yet sufficiently versed in the mechanisms of government to be able to restrain it. “We need many more eyes and ears, many more technicians on the ground,” he told Sharma and Solheim.

It is idealistic, in its way, the conception of an aggrieved, under-appreciated elite that is ready to be summoned to Washington. It sounds a lot like, well, Paul Dans. The question is, how many others like him have been out there all along, just waiting for this?

Doris Burke contributed research.

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Former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger endorses Biden

Republican former congressman Adam Kinzinger endorsed President Joe Biden on Wednesday, giving the Democrat a prominent new ally in his high-stakes campaign to win over moderate Republicans and independents this fall.

Kinzinger, a military pilot who emerged as a fierce critic of former President Donald Trump after the U.S. Capitol was attacked by Trump's supporters, described Trump as “a direct threat to every fundamental American value” in a video announcing the Biden endorsement.

“While I certainly don’t agree with President Biden on everything, and I never thought I’d be endorsing a Democrat for president, I know that he will always protect the very thing that makes America the best country in the world: our democracy,” said Kinzinger, who voted for Trump in 2020.

The former Illinois congressman also issued an ominous warning. Trump, he said, will “hurt anyone or anything in pursuit of power.”

Kinzinger's announcement comes on the eve of the opening presidential debate and gives Biden an example he can raise Thursday night of a well-known Republican supporting him over Trump. Biden’s camp is prioritizing outreach to moderate Republicans and independents alienated by Trump’s tumultuous White House tenure.

Kinzinger becomes the highest-profile Republican official formally backing Biden, whose campaign earlier in the month tapped Kinzinger's former chief of staff Austin Weatherford to serve as its national Republican outreach director. Republican former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan also endorsed Biden last month.

Ultimately, a number of prominent Republicans are expected to join Biden's campaign, with more influential names likely to be announced closer to the November election.

Shortly after Kinzinger announced his decision, Biden shared the endorsement video on social media and said he was grateful for the Republican's support.

“This is what putting your country before your party looks like,” Biden wrote on X.

Biden's team is trying to create what it calls “a permission structure” for Republican voters who would otherwise have a difficult time casting a ballot for the Democratic president.

Kinzinger developed a national profile as one of two Republicans who served on the House's committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. The committee highlighted a number of Trump's transgressions before and during the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol as Congress tried to certify the election results for Biden.

Kinzinger, who did not seek reelection in 2022 after voting to impeach Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack, called on the GOP to change course.

“To every American of every political party and those of none, I say now is not the time to watch quietly as Donald Trump threatens the future of America,” said Kinzinger, who repeatedly described himself as a conservative in the video. “Now is the time to unite behind Joe Biden and show Donald Trump off the stage once and for all.”

In a statement Wednesday, Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez described Kinzinger as “a true public servant who is a model for putting our country and our democracy over party and blind acquiescence to Trump.”

“Congressman Kinzinger represents the countless Americans that Donald Trump’s Republican Party have left behind," she said. “Those Americans have a home in President Biden’s coalition, and our campaign knows that we need to show up and earn their support.”

Trump and his allies have long dismissed Kinzinger's efforts to rally Republicans against him. The former president publicly celebrated when Kinzinger didn't seek reelection and has called for the prosecution of Kinzinger and others who served on the Jan. 6 committee, part of his pattern of suggesting his opponents face government retribution.

Biden has been particularly focused on courting supporters of Republican former presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who continued to win over a significant number of anti-Trump GOP primary voters throughout the spring even after suspending her campaign.

As part of Biden’s sustained outreach to moderate voters in both parties, his campaign released an ad highlighting Trump’s often-personal attacks against Haley, including his primary nickname of her as “birdbrain” and suggestion that “she’s not presidential timber.”

Haley last month said she will vote for Trump in the general election.

Indeed, Trump’s grip on his party’s passionate base is stronger than ever. And the overwhelming majority of Republican elected officials are backing his 2024 campaign, even those few, like Haley, who worked against him in the primary phase of the campaign.

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Profiles in cowardice: Three years after Jan. 6, GOP leaders won’t hold Trump accountable

Sen. John F. Kennedy wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Profiles in Courage” in 1956, focusing on eight U.S. senators Kennedy felt were courageous under intense pressure from the public and their own party. If you were to write a book about Republican House and Senate members in the three years since the Jan. 6 insurrection, you’d have to title it “Profiles in Cowardice.”

Just weeks before the Iowa caucuses, all the members of the GOP House leadership have endorsed former President Donald Trump. That’s the same Trump who sicced a mob on the Capitol, urging his supporters to “fight like hell.” Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a presidential candidate, was asked Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” why Republican politicians remain loyal to Trump. He replied that it’s “a combination of two emotions: fear and ambition.” 

RELATED STORY: Three years of Trump's lies about the Jan. 6 insurrection have taken their toll

That fear can be understood given the results of a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll published Tuesday. It shows that “Republicans are more sympathetic to those who stormed the U.S. Capitol and more likely to absolve Donald Trump of responsibility for the attack then they were in 2021.” That’s despite the twice-impeached former president facing 91 felony counts in four criminal indictments. The poll found:

More than 7 in 10 Republicans say that too much is being made of the attack and that it is “time to move on.” Fewer than 2 in 10 (18 percent) of Republicans say Jan. 6 protesters were “mostly violent,” dipping from 26 percent in 2021. 

The poll also found that only 14% of Republicans said Trump bears a great or good amount of responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack, compared with 27% in 2021. So it’s no surprise that Trump feels comfortable on the campaign trail where he regularly downplays the violence on Jan. 6. Yet nine deaths were linked to the Capitol attack, and more than 450 people have been sentenced to prison for their roles in it. The Associated Press reports:

Trump has still built a commanding lead in the Republican primary, and his rivals largely refrain from criticizing him about Jan. 6. He has called it “a beautiful day” and described those imprisoned for the insurrection as “great, great patriots” and “hostages.” At some campaign rallies, he has played a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by jailed rioters — the anthem interspersed with his recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Just Security reported that special counsel Jack Smith has taken notice of “Trump’s repeated embrace of the January 6 rioters” as part of the federal case against him for allegedly plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

Trump probably should have stuck to the script he read in a video released on Jan. 7, 2021. Trump was under pressure to make a statement after two Cabinet members and several other top administration officials had resigned over the Capitol violence. Trump denounced what he called the “heinous attack” on the U.S. Capitol and said:

“Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem  … America is and must always be a nation of law and order.

"The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay."

pic.twitter.com/csX07ZVWGe

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 8, 2021

Of course, Trump couldn’t stick to that script. But the Jan. 6 attack prompted some to prematurely declare the death of Trumpism. In an opinion piece in The Hill on  Jan. 7, 2021, Glenn C. Altschuler, professor of American Studies at Cornell University, wrote:

Trumpism has been exposed for what it is: a cancer on the Republican Party and a real threat to democracy in the United States. It is in our power — starting with Republican politicians in Washington, D.C. and red states, the mass media news outlets, as well as voters throughout the country — to make Jan. 6, 2021 the day Trumpism died.

Initially, Republican congressional leaders showed some spine. The New York Times wrote:

In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building, the two top Republicans in Congress, Representative Kevin McCarthy and Senator Mitch McConnell, told associates they believed President Trump was responsible for inciting the deadly riot and vowed to drive him from politics.

Mr. McCarthy went so far as to say he would push Mr. Trump to resign immediately: “I’ve had it with this guy,” he told a group of Republican leaders, according to an audio recording of the conversation obtained by The New York Times.

But within weeks both men backed off an all-out fight with Mr. Trump because they feared retribution from him and his political movement. Their drive to act faded fast as it became clear it would mean difficult votes that would put them at odds with most of their colleagues.

Just hours after the Capitol attack, 147 Republican lawmakers—a majority of the House GOP caucus and a handful of Republican senators—voted against certifying Biden’s election. Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the current House speaker, played a leading role in the effort to overturn the presidential election results. In a radio interview he even repeated the debunked claim about an international conspiracy involving deceased Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to hack voting machines. 

On Jan. 13, 2021, the House voted to impeach Trump for incitement of insurrection, but only 10 House Republicans supported the resolution. Only two of them remain in Congress. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy read the writing on the wall: He made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago on Jan. 27 to bend the knee to Trump. He realized that he never would become House speaker without Trump’s support. Trump’s Political Action Committee Save America put out this readout of the meeting:

“They discussed many topics, number one of which was taking back the House in 2022,” the statement read. “President Trump’s popularity has never been stronger than it is today, and his endorsement means more than perhaps any endorsement at any time.”

The Senate impeachment trial represented a last chance to drive a stake into Trump’s political career because conviction would have kept him from holding office again. Seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump, but the tally fell 10 votes short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction.
McConnell voted to acquit Trump. In his Feb. 13 speech to the Senate, he said Trump “is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events” of Jan. 6. He suggested that Trump could still be subject to criminal prosecution: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.” 
In 2023, McConnell stayed quiet when asked for reaction to Trump's criminal indictments. But McCarthy and other Republicans joined in defending Trump and criticizing prosecutors. On Aug. 14, 2023, after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis announced her racketeering and conspiracy indictment against Trump and 18 allies for allegedly trying to overturn the presidential election results in Georgia, McCarthy posted:

Justice should be blind, but Biden has weaponized government against his leading political opponent to interfere in the 2024 election. Now a radical DA in Georgia is following Biden’s lead by attacking President Trump and using it to fundraise her political career. Americans…

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) August 15, 2023

Trump has now made the outlandish claim that he’s immune from criminal prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election because he was serving as president at the time. In a brief filed last Saturday to a federal appeals court, Smith warned that Trump’s claims “threaten to undermine democracy.”

The events of Jan. 6 were a warning that Trump and his MAGA cultists really don’t believe in the Constitution. McKay Coppins, who wrote a biography of Mitt Romney, wrote in The Atlantic that the Utah senator wrestled with whether Trump caused the downfall of the GOP, or if it had always been in play:

Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—­people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?

The feckless Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has been a weather vane of what’s been happening within the GOP. During the 2016 campaign, he dismissed Trump as a “kook” and “race-baiting bigot” unfit to be president. Then Graham stuck his head up Trump’s posterior once the reality show host became president. On Jan. 6, 2021, Graham declared he had “enough” of Trump and voted to confirm the election results. But in February 2021, Graham made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to make peace with Trump. Graham’s remarks at the time proved to be quite prescient:

"If he ran, it would be his nomination for the having …" Graham told The Washington Post. "Because he was successful for conservatism and people appreciate his fighting spirit, he's going to dominate the party for years to come.” 

Recently, Graham even defended Trump’s presidential immunity claim on CBS’ “Face the Nation”:

“Now, if you're doing your job as president and January 6th he was still president, trying to find out if the election, you know, was on the up and up. I think his immunity claim, I don't know how it will bear out, but I think it's a legitimate claim. But they're prosecuting him for activity around January 6th, he didn't break into the Capitol, he gave a fiery speech, but he's not the first guy to ever do that.”

After Jan. 6, some ultra-right Republicans tried to portray what happened as a largely peaceful protest and absolve Trump of any blame. Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia said many of the people who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 behaved in an orderly manner as if they were on a "normal tourist visit." Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar blamed the violence on left-wing activists, calling it an “Antifa provocation.”

But now the fringe conspiracy theories have moved into the party’s mainstream as MAGA Republicans have gained influence in Congress. As speaker, McCarthy granted then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 42,000 hours of Jan. 6 security footage. Carlson used the footage for a show that portrayed the riot as a peaceful gathering. “These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers,” Carlson said.

Trump claimed Carlson’s show offered “irrefutable” evidence that the rioters had been wrongly accused of crimes and called for the release of those jailed on charges related to the attack, the Associated Press reported. In the December Republican presidential debate, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy pushed the conspiracy theory that the Jan. 6 attack looked “like it was an inside job” orchestrated by federal agents.

Trump has pushed these “deep state” conspiracy theories in filings by his lawyers in the case brought by Smith accusing Trump of attempting to overturn the 2020 election results, The Washington Post reported. The Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that 34% of Republicans believe the FBI organized and encouraged the Jan. 6 insurrection, compared with 30% of independents and 13% of Democrats.

In a CNN Town Hall in May, Trump said he had no regrets about what happened on Jan. 6 and repeated the Big Lie that the 2020 election “was rigged.” Trump has also portrayed Ashli Babbitt—the Jan. 6 protester who was fatally shot by police as she tried to force her way into the House chamber—as a martyr. He has cast the jailed Jan. 6 insurrectionists as “patriotic” heroes. That should raise alarm bells because there’s a dangerous precedent. After his failed 1923 Munich Beer Hall putsch, Adolf Hitler referred to Nazi storm troopers killed in the attempted coup as blood martyrs. It took Hitler a decade to become chancellor of Germany in 1933.

RELATED STORY: 100 years after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Trump is borrowing from Hitler's playbook

As we mark the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump is on a faster track to become president again, aided and abetted by right-wing news outlets and social media platforms like Elon Musk’s X.

Biden understands the growing threat to American democracy. That’s why he’s following up his Friday speech in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, about democracy on the brink with an advertising push starting Jan. 6. In the Biden-Harris campaign’s first ad of 2024, Biden says: “Now something dangerous is happening in America. There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy. All of us are being asked right now, what will we do to maintain our democracy?”

RELATED STORY: Trump attorney leans on Supreme Court to repay their debt to Trump

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Hypocritical Republicans follow the new script in the wake of Trump’s latest indictment

When it comes to Republican lawmakers, hypocrisy knows no bounds, especially when it comes to Donald Trump. With rare exception, they either loudly support the MAGA cult, or are afraid to challenge it—so much so that the GOP should probably be renamed POT (Party of Trump), as in “the GOP has gone to POT.”
In the wake of Trump’s fourth criminal indictment—brought Monday by Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, charging Trump and 18 associates with racketeering in a plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election—elected Republicans have predictably jumped to Trump’s defense. The Georgia indictment follows the federal indictment brought by special counsel Jack Smith on Aug. 1, charging Trump with conspiring to subvert American democracy by scheming to reverse Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
Incredibly, the latest talking point for Trump defenders is that if Democrats want to ensure Trump, the current GOP frontrunner, isn’t elected president in 2024, they should let it happen at the ballot box rather than in the courthouse.
This script ignores entirely that so many of Trump’s legal issues stem from the fact that he wouldn't concede that the previous presidential election had been decided at the ballot box.

Nearly three years after Americans voted him out of the White House, Trump continues to push the Big Lie. He’s even hosting a press conference Monday, promising a “complete EXONERATION” that will prove his tired claims of fraud. Trump has also backed election deniers in races for key state offices (fortunately, most have lost) that could help undermine voters in 2024. Americans have no guarantee that he wouldn’t push the replay button on the well-documented “fake electors” scheme of 2020 in the face of another loss to Joe Biden in 2024.

Nevertheless, in a Wednesday appearance on The Hugh Hewitt Show, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas embraced the script.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR): “It would be much better from [the liberals’] point of view…if they try to stop [Trump]...at the ballot box…as opposed to having rabid zealots like Jack Smith or partisans like Alvin Bragg and the woman in Atlanta…try to take him out of contention.” pic.twitter.com/FChgth20Oz

— The Recount (@therecount) August 16, 2023

Transcript:

“I understand that the Democrats and liberals in the media can’t stand Donald Trump and they’ll  do anything to stop him. But it would be much better from their point of view and the point of view of the country if they try to stop him on the campaign trail and at the ballot box. And let the American people make these choices as opposed to having rabid zealots like Jack Smith or partisans like Alvin Bragg and the woman in Atlanta make these decisions for them — to try to take Donald Trump out of contention.”

Notice how Cotton dismisses and disrespects DA Willis, not even referring to her by her name or title. 

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But Cotton was not sharing an original thought. His comments echo those made by other GOP lawmakers who have rushed to use similar talking points to defend the indefensible Donald Trump, without even considering the details of the indictments against him.

As South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told Fox News on Tuesday:

“The American people can decide whether they want him to be president or not. This should be decided at the ballot box and not in a bunch of liberal jurisdictions trying to put the man in jail. They are weaponizing the law in this country. They are trying to take Donald Trump down and this is setting a bad precedent.

Are we going to let county prosecutors start prosecuting the … former president of the United States? You open up Pandora’s box to the presidency. This whole exercise of allowing a county prosecutor to go after a former president of the United States will do a lot of damage to the presidency itself over time. To my Democratic friends, be careful what you wish for.”

RELATED STORY: Lindsey Graham makes the most moronic Trump defense yet and gets slammed

It’s possible Graham’s position as a U.S. senator saved him from being among the many co-conspirators indicted by Willis. Fulton County’s Trump investigation did look into a November 2020 phone call that Graham made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, where Graham attempted to cast doubt on the state’s signature-matching law for mail-in ballots.

But back to the script. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas had this to say in a social media post on Xwitter:

“The indictments of Donald Trump are all about how Democrats don’t value democracy & the democratic process. Dems fear that if the voters can decide fairly in 2024 they will reject Joe Biden’s disastrous record.”

Sure, Rafael.

Cruz even went so far as to play reporter from outside the Fulton County courthouse Monday night (and promote his podcast) on Fox News’ “Hannity” show. Cruz chased soundbites with a stick mic as he waited for indictments against Trump and his co-conspirators to be handed down.  

Ted Cruz reacts to the Georgia grand jury indictments: "I'm pissed...We've never once indicted a former president...This is disgraceful...It is an abuse of power by angry Democrats who've decided the rule of law doesn't matter anymore." pic.twitter.com/ZdD0XuWjUK

— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) August 15, 2023

Cruz, of course, led the Senate effort to reject electoral votes for Biden from Arizona and Pennsylvania on Jan. 6, 2021.

Meanwhile, HuffPost reports that Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the lead manager in the House’s second impeachment trial of Trump, ridiculed the notion that the justice system should step aside while Trump seeks a second term in 2024.

Raskin told HuffPost:

“Wouldn’t it be great if you could never prosecute anyone for trying to overthrow an election that they lost, because then they can keep trying to overthrow elections? Didn’t Ted Cruz go to Harvard Law School? Gee, you would have thought he would have had a little more faith in the American justice system than that.”

Raskin noted that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution bars from office anyone who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States. Even some conservative legal scholars have concluded that the language disqualifies Trump from holding office, though their scholarship has obviously had no effect on Trump’s 2024 campaign.

RELATED STORY: Conservatives want to bar Trump from ballot under the 14th Amendment? Get in line

Let’s check in with Republican congressional leadership!

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California again reverted to his cherished talking point about the “weaponization of government” against Trump, overlooking the fact that weaponizing the government is exactly what Trump did with Attorney General Bill Barr’s Justice Department during his administration—and Cotton hinted to Hewitt that Democrats could expect as much from Republicans in the future. 

McCarthy was up late Monday night, and took to Xwitter when the Fulton County indictments dropped. “Biden has weaponized government against his leading political opponent to interfere in the 2024 election,” McCarthy wrote. “Now a radical DA in Georgia is following Biden’s lead by attacking President Trump and using it to fundraise her political career.”

Justice should be blind, but Biden has weaponized government against his leading political opponent to interfere in the 2024 election. Now a radical DA in Georgia is following Biden’s lead by attacking President Trump and using it to fundraise her political career. Americans…

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) August 15, 2023

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, however, has put his head in his tortoise shell.

Roll Call reported Tuesday that McConnell has remained quiet regarding Willis’s indictment; Spectrum News in Kentucky noted the same on Wednesday.

Recall what McConnell said when he decided to vote to acquit Trump after his second impeachment trial in February 2021.

“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office as an ordinary citizen,”  McConnell said. “He didn’t get away with anything. Yet.”

"We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation," he continued. "And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one."

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both New York Democrats, issued a joint statement Monday evening.

“As a nation built on the rule of law, we urge Mr. Trump, his supporters and his critics to allow the legal process to proceed without outside interference,” they said.

HuffPost offered this reaction from Democratic Rep. Nikema Williams, whose district includes most of Atlanta.

“We fully intend to beat the former president at the ballot box but this is about accountability, giving the people who show up to vote confidence that their will be counted,” Williams said Tuesday on a press call organized by the nonprofit Public Citizen.

The last word goes to Willis, who rejected claims by Trump and other Republicans that her prosecution was politically motivated.

"I make decisions in this office based on the facts and the laws," Willis said. "The law is completely nonpartisan. That's how decisions are made in every case."

Democrat Adam Frisch raises $2.6 million in 2nd quarter for 2024 rematch against Lauren Boebert

Democratic challenger Adam Frisch has raised more than $2.6 million in the second quarter for his rematch against MAGA Republican extremist Rep. Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. Frisch almost pulled off one of the biggest upsets in the 2022 midterms when he lost to Boebert by a mere 546 votes in what surprisingly turned out to be the closest House race in the country. 

Frisch’s campaign, in a statement released Thursday, described the second-quarter fund-raising haul of more than $2.6 million as “shattering the record for the largest quarterly fundraising for a U.S. House challenger in the year before an election, excluding special elections and self-funded campaigns.”

The campaign said the average donation was just over $32 coming from over 81,000 individual donations from all 27 counties in the district and all 50 states. He is not accepting donations from corporate PACs.

RELATED STORY: After voting against infrastructure, Lauren Boebert dimly wonders why we don't spend more on it

In the statement, Frisch, a businessman and former Aspen city council member, thanked everyone who had donated to his campaign “to give the people of Southern and Western Colorado a representative who will take the job seriously and work across the aisle to find solutions to the problems facing the district.”

“Boebert continues to vote against the interests of her constituents while devoting her time to ‘angertainment’ antics that do nothing to help CO-3," Frisch said. "We can do better than Boebert, and thanks to our generous supporters, we will defeat her in 2024.”

Honored and humbled. Thank you to everyone of you who has donated, RT'ed, messaged, and joined this growing coalition. We are just getting started! pic.twitter.com/HxdsZVQ6c6

— Adam Frisch for CD-3 (@AdamForColorado) July 6, 2023

So far this year, Frisch has raised $4.4 million which is nearly two-thirds of the $6.7 million he raised for the 2022 campaign, much of which came in during the final weeks of the campaign after polls showed the race to be competitive.

In the first quarter of 2023, Frisch’s campaign brought in nearly $1.75 million compared to just over $763,000 for Boebert. Boebert has not yet reported her second-quarter fund-raising totals.  She raised $7.85 million for the 2022 campaign.

Frisch filed his paperwork for a 2024 rematch with Boebert on Feb. 14.

“People want the circus to stop. They want someone to focus on the district, not on themselves,” Frisch said. He added that the issues in CD3, such as water, mental health, agriculture, and the importance of domestic energy, are not “red and blue."https://t.co/5ghBlqTIwu

— Adam Frisch for CD-3 (@AdamForColorado) February 16, 2023

Boebert is considered the most vulnerable of the big-name MAGA Republican extremists in the House, most of whom represent deep-red congressional districts. Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District is rated as +9 GOP.

By contrast, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene won reelection by a 66% to 34% margin over Democrat Marcus Flowers in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District even though part of Democratic-leaning Cobb County was added to her district as a result of gerrymandering to give Republicans a bigger advantage in neighboring districts. Flowers raised more than $15.6 million in a totally noncompetitive race.

In 2022, both national parties mostly ignored Colorado's Republican-leaning 3rd Congressional District, which was considered solidly Republican by nearly all election forecasters.

In April, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee listed Boebert as among the Republican incumbents it considers most vulnerable. House Republicans have also put Boebert on their list of most vulnerable incumbents.

At the time, DCCC spokesperson Tommy Garcia told the website Colorado Politics in an email:

“Lauren Boebert is more obsessed with catching headlines and being the token MAGA extremist than actually working for everyday Coloradans. Between her dangerous conspiracies and outright racist bigotry, CO-03 voters can see that Lauren Boebert is an unserious member of Congress, unwilling to go to bat for them on issues facing Colorado. Her time in Congress is ticking down.”

A poll released in April by a Democratic firm showed that Boebert and Frisch were in a dead heat in the 3rd Congressional District, Colorado Politics reported.

The Global Strategy Group's Mountaineer poll, conducted March 29-April 2 in partnership with liberal advocacy group ProgressNow Colorado, found Boebert and Frisch tied at 45% each among likely voters, with the remaining 10% split between voters who are undecided and those who say they plan to vote for someone else. Cook Political has shifted the district to Leans Republican from Safe Republican.

Despite her razor-thin victory margin, Boebert has done little to tone down her extremism in the new Congress. Boebert was among about 20 extreme right-wing House Republicans who opposed Kevin McCarthy’s speakership bid until the very end. She also pushed for the House to vote on a resolution to impeach President Joe Biden—a move that McCarthy dismissed as “premature.”

Frisch still has his work cut out for him. This time he doesn’t have the advantage of surprise, and turnout will be greater in a presidential election year. As a national figure, Boebert can raise lots of funds from MAGA Republicans across the country.

The last Democrat to represent Colorado’s largely rural 3rd Congressional District was three-term Rep. John Salazar, who lost his bid for reelection in 2010.

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